Global Game Settings Settings for Windows Phone 8

In the Global Games Settings of GameMaker:Studio, you can find the different set up options related to how your final game will look when you create the executable for the target platform. Here we will look at the Windows Phone tab. It is split into three sub-tabs, each of which is explained in the sections below:

General

The first thing to do on the General tab is to fill in the details of your game, with the following fields available:

Display Name: Specifies the friendly name for the app that is displayed to users (this string is localizable).

Description: This should be a short descriptive text for your game.

Author: The name of the person (or company) that created the game.

Publisher: The name of the person (or company) that is publishing the game.

Version: The version number of your game.

NOTE : Make sure your details in this tab match what you put in your Marketplace registration for the game when you are submitting to the Windows Store!

After filling in these details, you should then select the Orientation and Supported Resolutions. The orientation section can be used to lock the game to one, some or all of the available orientations. These are:

Landscape

Portrait

landscape Flipped

On devices that can be rotated, such as tablets, the game won't be redrawn for orientations that aren't specified with this property - for example, the game won't rotate if the device is rotated to a Portrait orientation but the property specifies only Landscape and Landscape-flipped orientations. On devices that can't be rotated, a game might be shown in that device's default orientation, and the game's preferred orientation will be ignored, however, your game's preferred rotation will be honoured on devices on which a rotation lock has been activated. These orientation preference choices apply to both the splash screen and the game itself every time a new instance is launched.

Finally, the resolution section is used to target your game at specific displays. As with the orientation, you can select one or more of these options, but if you select various, you must make sure that your game is scalable in all resolutions. The following table shows the resolutions and ratios supported:

NameResolutionAspect RatioScaled Resolution

WVGA

480 * 800

15:9

480 * 800

WXGA

768 * 1280

15:9

480 * 800

720p

720 * 1280

16:9

480 * 853

Graphics

Here you can give your game an Icon and different Splash Screens. The icon should be authored as an individual *.png file with a size of 99x99px. The splash screens should be made to the sizes of each of the available Windows phone resolutions, also in *.png format, and it will briefly be shown while the game assets are being loaded.

At the bottom there is the option to set the size of the Texture Page. The default (and most compatible) size is 1024x1024, but you can choose from anywhere between 256x256 up to 2048x2048. There is also a button marked Preview which will generate the texture pages for this platform and then open a window so that you can see how they look. This can be very useful if you wish to see how the texture pages are structured and to prevent having texture pages larger (or smaller) than necessary.

NOTE : Be aware that the larger the size of the texture page, the less compatible your game will be.

Installation

The Tiles sub-tab is further split into three separate groups, of which you should choose one to represent how the Live Tile that represents your game or app will be shown on the device.

Flip

Flip tiles are ones that will change from one "side" to another every few seconds, and here you can add the different images that you wish each "side" to show. Note that the smallest possible tile size does not flip and so you only need to supply one 159x159px image for that, while the other two sizes (medium 336x336px and wide 691x336px) will.

Beneath the images you can also supply two Content strings. These will be shown on the back tile only, with the first string being for the medium size and the second one being for the wide size. Should you wish text on the front of the tile you will need to use the special win8_* tile functions that are part of the GameMaker:Studio programming language GML.

Iconic

The Iconic tile setting uses two images (small at 110x110px and medium at 202x202px) and a series of different text messages to display information about your game. If the user has reduced the tile size to the smallest or the medium size, then the respective images will be shown only, however when the user has a wide tile size selected, then the image will be displayed as an icon in the lower right of the tile and various lines of text will be displayed starting at the top right of the tile. The image below illustrates this: Note that an Iconic Tile image will only ever be white, so the image chosen should be a single "silhouette" with alpha. No matter what your image, it will only ever be shown on an Iconic tile as a white image over a transparent background.

Cycle

The final tile type is the Cyclic one. This permits you to specify a small image (159x159px for the small and medium sizes) and a series of 9 different wide tile images (691 x 336px) that will be cycled using various different transitions.